The Effect Of Delay On Consumption Emotion And Subjective Evaluation

Consumers experience delay in various circumstances of daily life,that is,consumers have to wait for a period due to the scarcity of resources,venues,our other reasons.A delay in consumption always have an important impact on product evaluation.Traditional theories of behavioral economics suggest that people tend to discount delayed reward,which means delay has a negative effect.However,our findings indicated that,for those products or services that consumers are willing to wait to obtain,an externally imposed delay duration might,in fact,have a positive effect on product evaluation.Through four studies,we employed a multimethod approach to investigate whether,how,and why delay has a positive effect on subjective evaluation.Based on the summary of prior literature,we conducted four experiments to verify our hypothesis,including two laboratory experiments,one online experiment,and one field experiment.In Experiment 1,we adopt delay and no-delay to manipulate delayed consumption,the main positive effect of delay on subjective evaluation was investigated by a laboratory experiment.In Experiment 2,an online experiment was conducted to explore the anticipated emotions during delayed consumption in a hypothetical consumption scenario.We repeated the main effect and found that the anticipated negative emotion for waiting was increased,when the anticipated positive emotion was decreased.In Experiment 3,we adopted a laboratory experiment to test if the main of delay on subjective evaluation was stable in the real consumption scenario.It was found that in the process of waiting,the negative emotion was increased,and the positive emotion was decreased,which represented the same tendency with the hypothetical scenario.Moreover,after the process of waiting,the positive emotion increased and the negative emotion decreased significantly,and the positive emotion mediated the effect of delay on subjective evaluation.In Experiment 4,a field experiment was conducted and we manipulated delay by separating participants waiting for a long or short time.The main purpose of this experiment was to explore the emotion after the process of waiting and the subjective evaluation of products in a real scenario.It was found that after the process of waiting,participants represented significant higher positive emotion and lower negative emotion,and the positive emotion mediated the effect of delay on subjective evaluation.Our results showed that externally imposed delay had a positive effect on subjective value through increasing positive emotion after the process of waiting.Our findings offer insight into the economic model of delay discounting,with the four studies expanding the research field of delay and integral emotion,and leading cumulatively to a novel comprehension of delay with important practical implications.For those products or services that consumers are willing to wait to obtain,appropriate delay and increasing positive emotion after waiting might have significant impact on product evaluation.There are several limitations in the present,future research could further investigate the boundary of positive effect of delay and the continuous measurements of emotion.